There are several sites that bloggers use to try and drive traffic to their own sites, and Entrecard, one of the most discussed sites has recently announce yet another change in service. It seems like every few months, EntreCard announces yet another major change which further alienates their users. There former scheme was that when you 'drop' and EntreCard, you receive one credit, as does the blog that you drop your card on. Credits are removed from the system by the large cut that EntreCard takes on advertisements.

The problem, according to EntreCard is that there continues to be more credits generated than removed from the system and this is generating advertising inflation, they claim. To address this, they are looking at changing the scheme to pay credits only if someone drops on a blog, and not to the blog that will be dropped on.

They have not provided any detailed numbers about the number of credits in circulation, nor have I seen an inflationary impact of such credits. Indeed, based on my experience, there was a major deflation of advertising costs when they introduced paid advertisements, which they have removed due to user backlash. There was inflation in advertising costs after they removed the paid advertising. It briefly reached back to the level prior to the paid advertising fiasco but has now fallen back a bit. I should note that this is based on the ratio of advertising price to popularity which is a loose proxy to cost per impressions.

How much of an effect will this have? It is hard to say. For people that advertise solely for the purpose of getting people to visit their blog, it shouldn't have a substantial effect. However, many people advertise, in part, to get credits from people clicking on their ads. This incentive is being removed, and could end up reducing the demand for advertisements.

For me, I'm careful not to flood the market with too many advertisements. Too many ads are infective since people are likely to only visit your site once a day, no matter how many times they see your ad. So, a decrease in demand for advertisements is likely to cause larger advertisers to curtail some of their advertising.

In the bigger picture, EntreCard needs to do something to address their declining market share. I have move a bit of my advertising over to Adgitize. They have a different model. You have to buy advertisements with real currency. They cost $14/month. However, based on the traffic you get, you can easily earn back more than the cost of your advertisement. For me, Adgitize is generating cash for me, as well as nearly twice as much traffic as EntreCard.

Another blog advertising site is CMF Ads. Adgitize and EntreCard both have been generating much more traffic for me than CMF Ads. CMF Ads doesn't have incentives for people to click on the ads, but I've found the bounce rate and time on site from people visiting from CMF Ads to not be substantially different for people visiting from Adgitize or EntreCard. They have been fairly effective in generating revenue, but like EntreCard and unlike Adgitize, I have not 'cashed out' any revenue from them. Adgitize sends me a monthly credit on Paypal.

Another site that generates a lot of traffic for me is BlogExplosion. They are similar to EntreCard and the others in that you get traffic directed to your site based on which other sites you visit. In there case, it is much more direct. You get credits for visiting a site, and those credits get used to send people to our site. They've been around for a long time and have driven a lot of traffic to my site. On the other hand, they've had problems with tech support and their future also remains dubious.

All of this said, blog advertising can be a great way of reaching new readers. What is much more important, however, is having content that people want to read. Getting discussions going about your content on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Friend Feed, and comment systems like Disqus can be even more significant.

So, what are your thoughts about EntreCard today? How are you driving traffic to your site? What are you doing to keep people coming back?